Posts Tagged ‘toddlers’

I was upstairs this morning, trying to put away some laundry, when I head blood-curdling screams coming from downstairs where the kids were playing. Fearing some horrible scene awaiting my discovery, I bolted down to the living room.

From Wikipedia.

To my surprise, the kids both had huge grins on their faces as they ran back and forth across the living room, shrieking at the top of their lungs all the while.

“What are you guys doing?” I asked.

“Playing screaming,” our three year-old answered matter-of-factly, as though this should have been completely obvious.

The Cosgrove CD was a Christmas present from the grandparents to our three year-old son, while the Neubauten album is something I’ve had in one format or another for many years.

That a couple of preschoolers would enjoy listening to treacly tween pop isn’t the least bit surprising, but their enjoyment of Einstürzende Neubauten is only surprising until you stop and think about it for a moment:

What do toddlers and early preschoolers enjoy doing? Banging and scraping stuff together loudly, especially if they’re metal pots and pans, with occasional random screaming.

What has Einstürzende Neubauten made a career out of doing? Banging and scraping stuff together loudly, with occasional screaming.

Add the two together, and of course little kids are going to like avant-garde German industrial music from the mid 1980s. They haven’t had the chance to form a preconceived opinion that it’s strange yet; all they know is that it sounds kind of like what they like doing anyway.

Add processed pop music targeted at kids to the mix, and they’re all over it — which is how we ended up with Einstürzende Cosgrove playing in the living room, over and over again, all morning. To them, that isn’t weird at all. I, on the other hand, was ready to curl up into a little ball muttering, “Can’t sleep – clowns will eat me,” by lunchtime.

I can’t help but wonder what a DJ mashup of the two albums would sound like, if only for the entertainment value provided by potential track titles like “Kissin’ Yü-Gung” or “Shakespeare Brennt.”

Like this:

Our two year-old is dancing around the living room like a maniac to Lodger by David Bowie while wearing a steel bucket on his head and talking into the splash guard from his potty, which he likes to pretend is his cell phone.

Now that our son is 27 months old, he’s been getting curious about a lot of things around him. It’s definitely a good development, but it can also be a bad thing, especially since I have a tendency to give straight answers to questions.

For example, the area above our kitchen table is covered by my collection of African folk art, which I’ve always been drawn to, for reasons I’ve never been able to understand. They’re mostly woodcarvings, with a painting and other sculptures thrown in, and while some were made to be purely decorative, others are religious art, like representations of various Orisha (in oversimplified terms, Orisha are aspects of Olodumare, the supreme being in some West African and syncretic Western Hemisphere belief systems).

So today, the kid was pointing at one of them and asking, “WaDat?”

“That’s a wooden mask of an Orisha,” I said.

“Ur-sha?”

“Yup. It’s like a deity from West Africa.”

“KA!!!” he shouted, happy about recognizing the word (his grandparents got him a talking globe a while ago, which he loves playing with. He’s become able to identify Africa, Asia, Japan, and North and South America by name without our help at all, and he seems to know that Canada and Mexico are somewhere in North America, and that China and India are somewhere in Asia. Somehow, he ended up knowing more world geography than most Americans before he turned two.)

“That’s right,” I said. “Orisha are in some American religions like Vodou and Santería, too.”

“Fuh-doo,” he said.

It was at this point that I realized, given the general mentality of our area coupled with the fact that most of the preschools around here are run by and/or in churches, we should probably not be having this conversation right now. It’s a shame, really. I can all too easily picture our kids getting thrown out of preschool in a couple of years for trying to do something like explain the tenets of Voodoo to other kids in a completely even-handed and non-hysterical manner. Either that, or a scene like this unfolding:

Churchy Preschool Teacher: (holding up a cross) Can anybody tell me what this means?

One Of Our Kids: Legba and Ghede!!!!

Churchy Preschool Teacher: IN THE CORNER!!! NOW!!!!! (squirts the kid with a spray bottle of holy water)

I have to wonder what the exact purpose of all the baby toys we own is when it’s painfully obvious that the baby’s current favorite toy is a can of mushrooms. It’s shiny, and it has a label with bright colors! Plus, you can roll it around the room. What more could anyone possibly want?

As for our two-year old, he completely polished off a heaping bowl of leftover lentil and tomato curry with brown rice for breakfast this morning. It’s one of his favorite foods. He also likes to pull my wife’s paperback copy of Nightmares and Dreamscapes off the shelf, point to the picture of Stephen King on the back cover, and shout, “Dad!” He’s also done this to the TV on the few occasions he’s seen Barack Obama on television. For the record, I look nothing like Stephen King, nor do I resemble the President. He also refers to Abby Cadabby, and only Abby Cadabby, as “Mom” when watching Sesame Street.